What do you call an escaped agricultural plant? I ask because two recent items have made me wonder. Exhibit A, a Zester Daily article entitled Wild Apple Adventure. Naturally I conjured up scenes of derring do in the mountains around Almaty. How disappointing, then, to discover that Zester’s version of “wild” is actually “feral,” apple trees that have either survived the orchard around them or else are seedlings growing in the wild.
Exhibit B, a recent announcement on a mailing list of a meeting on Nordic Relict Plants. 1 I’d always thought of relicts as leftovers from massive ecological changes, like relict rain forests, or relict pockets of pre-ice age flora. But no …
This meeting is for everyone with an interest in relict plants, particularly but not exclusively, in Nordic and Arctic areas. By a relict plant we mean a plant species or variety that was, but is no longer, cultivated in a particular place, and has survived in that place after cultivation stopped. These plants are important parts of our cultural history and can sometimes contain genetic material that is different from more modern varieties of the plant.
So, what should one call these plants? Wild, to me, sounds wrong. Feral, most dictionaries I consulted agree, suggests both “not domesticated or cultivated” and “having escaped from domestication”. To which at least one helpfully adds “having escaped from domestication and become wild,” which is surely not true of erstwhile crops.
I rather like “relict”. What do you think?”